Severance Package (6 page)

Every one of David Murphy’s employees was issued company cell phones, free of charge, to use as they wished. David’s only rule: Keep the phone on from 7:00
A.M.
until midnight, just in case he needed to reach you. Agree to that, and you could enjoy unlimited minutes, long distance, you name it. Every one of David’s direct reports—Jamie, Amy, Ethan, Roxanne, Stuart, Molly, Nichole—immediately canceled their private cells and used their company phones exclusively. David had even sprung for models with built-in cameras and texting capability.

But none of that mattered with the service canceled.

“Why did he cancel it?”

“I should have known …,” Molly said, near-wailing. “I saw the signs….”

“What signs?

Amy, on the floor with David, said, “Forget it. I’ve still got a pulse, but he needs an ambulance
now.”

“Was he kidding about the elevators, too?”

Molly wearily said,
“No.”

“I’m going to check anyway.”

“We should check our offices. Not all of the phones may be turned off.”

“The stairs.”

“David said the stairs were rigged with …”

“What? Sarin?” Nichole said. “Do you really believe that?”

“He wasn’t joking. He showed me a packet. Told me exactly what it was. I think he was showing off.”

“He showed you?” Nichole asked. “When? How long have you known about this.”

Amy said, “We’ve got to find Ethan.”

Ethan didn’t feel so good.

Okay, yeah, maybe he
had
screamed a bit prematurely. But that puff of whatever that’d nailed him … c’mon, you’d be frightened, too. In his imagination, it was a burst of ultra-hot steam from a chipped pipe. The kind of steam so lethally hot, it scalded the flesh from his face before his nerves had a chance to relay the pain. From here on out, he’d be stuck hiding behind masks, or at the very least, ridiculous amounts of theatrical makeup.

All of that passed through his mind in about two seconds. His fingers explored his face.

Flesh still there. His eyes, too. His burning eyes.

Burning, but not about to shrivel up and drop out of their sockets.

Still, they burned. Worse by the second.

He needed water.

He must have been blasted with wet air that had been circulating throughout 1919 Market Street since the place was built—around the time KC and the Sunshine Band were first huge. That air was carrying every germ and virus that had plagued this building’s inhabitants in years since. Ethan had a feeling he’d be sick the rest of the summer.

Ethan needed the men’s room. Wash out his eyes. His face. His badly burning eyes. Compose himself enough so that when he popped into David’s office, he would be able to say,
Screaming? I didn’t hear any screaming,
and have it sound believable.

He pulled on the doorknob. The door wouldn’t open. He tried it again. Nothing. Locked.

Wait.

Damn it.

He could see it, even through his blurry, stinging vision. The cardboard had slipped out.

Ethan tugged at it, cursed, then kicked the door. His skin around his eyes was really starting to sting now, too.

“Hey!”

Kicked it again.

“Hey! Anybody!”

He was about to kick again—in fact, his foot was already cocked, ready to deliver the blow, when he heard something

POP!

A car backfiring.

Up here? On the thirty-sixth floor?

“Hey!”

This was ridiculous. Everyone was probably already gathered in the conference room. Probably closed the door, too, for the big secret operational announcement. Which he was missing. Locked on the other side of this door. Eyes burning, face itching. More intense than ever. His throat, suddenly raw.

Nobody was going to hear him yell.

Especially with his throat closing, all of a sudden.

Jamie mumbled something about being right back and walked to his office.

Roxanne gaped at him on the way out, as in: You’re leaving now?

With our boss, shot in the head, lying on the floor?

Jamie was trying to think a few steps ahead. Maybe his
monthlong paternity leave had given him a different perspective, but right now, his worry wasn’t David Murphy. He was worried about what David had
said.
Elevators, blocked. Phone lines, cut. The cell phone thing, if Molly was to be believed, was troubling in itself.

Jamie’s office was the farthest away from David’s, but closest to the conference room. This usually bugged him. Not today. He needed to make it to his office as soon as possible.

He needed a few seconds to think.

Jamie had never been a fan of group decisions. Whatever was happening in the conference room, he wasn’t an important part of it. He was the company’s press guy—the guy who wrote the press release in the event of a new hire or the launch of a new financial product. He wasn’t the guy doing the hiring, and he had nothing to do with the financial products. He wasn’t a member of the Clique. He took whatever the managers said and translated it into something the trade press could understand. There weren’t many trade publications that covered his particular industry; Jamie had been shocked at how small the list was when he started a year ago.

But what had David been saying, right before Molly shot him in the head?

Front company?

Intelligence agency?

I mean …
what?

Jamie sat behind his desk and saw the greeting card tacked to his corkboard. He’d almost forgotten about that.

Andrea had given it to him the day Chase was born, a month ago. It was a card from Baby Chase to his new daddy. On the front was a cartoon duck—a little boy duck, wearing little boy pants. Fireworks burst behind him.
HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY, DADDY
the card said on the back. “You’re just lucky he wasn’t born on Arbor Day,” Andrea had joked. But Jamie loved that
card to an absurd degree. It was the little duck, in the little boy pants.
His
little boy. For the first time, it all clicked. He’d brought it to work with him a few days later as he packed up his Rolodex and notes for his paternity leave. Unpaid, but what the hell. How often are firstborn sons born?

The card was meant to be tacked up temporarily, to put a smile on Jamie’s face as he went through the drudgery of answering last e-mails, setting his voice mail vacation message, gathering up manila folders full of junk he knew he wouldn’t actually touch for at least a month. But in the hurry to leave, the card was forgotten. Jamie wanted to kick himself, but it wasn’t worth showing his face in the office just to recover the card. He’d be sucked back into the vortex too quickly—one more press release, c’mon, just one more …

Jamie put his fingers to the greeting card. Smoothed the imaginary feathers on the head of the little boy duck. Then he tucked it in his back pocket.

He desperately needed to call Andrea, tell her what was going on, and somehow convince her that she didn’t need to worry.

But his office phone, like the one in the conference room, was dead. Jamie looked out his office window, which faced east. If he craned his neck, he could almost see the corner of his block, off in the distance beyond Spring Garden Street. Just two houses down from the corner were Andrea and his baby boy.

Whatever had happened this morning, Jamie knew it would be many, many hours before he would see his wife and son again. The police interrogations alone would probably keep him here—or down at the Roundhouse—until late tonight.

He just wished the police could be called, so they could arrive, so that they could get it all over with already.

Look at me, he thought. The new daddy. Gone for barely an hour, and already nervous as hell.

Nervous daddy.

Wait a minute.

Jamie saw his soft leather briefcase on the desk. Was it still in there?

It would make all the difference.

The remaining employees split up. If they had any chance of calling an ambulance—for Stuart or David or both, even though Stuart’s chances of making it through this without brain damage were next to nil—they were going to have to find their way to another floor. That much was clear.

Nichole announced that they’d be checking the elevators, and it took Roxanne a second to realize that
they
meant her, too. Jamie had already slipped out of the conference room to find a phone or sit behind his desk and cry or something. Ethan was still AWOL. Molly left a second later, most likely to the bathroom to puke. Amy couldn’t blame her. She had only
watched
her boss take a bullet to the head, and she felt queasy.

Of course, that left Amy to lock the doors to the conference room, leaving the guns where they were. Let the police sort it out.

It also left her to check the fire escape doors. You know, the ones allegedly rigged with a chemical nerve agent.

Sometimes, Amy felt like the only adult in this company.

There were only two fire escapes in the building; both were accessible only from outside the office. The thirty-sixth floor was a square carved up into two separate offices; their company dominated the floor in a U shape. The remaining sliver was occupied by a local magazine called
Philadelphia Living—
shopping, restaurants, parties, and all of that good stuff. Amy was a subscriber, even though she didn’t know anybody who could afford the getaways, clothes, and jewelry highlighted in the magazine every month. It was lifestyle porn: You’ll never
have it as good as this. Masturbate to the pages, if it makes you feel better.

She walked halfway down the hall that connected the conference room with David’s office, then turned left. A security door opened up directly onto a short corridor. Make a left again, and you’d be staring at the north fire escape door.

Which Amy was doing now.

Staring at it.

Should she chance it?

David had told them some wild things this morning. There was not much she could prove right now, except for one thing: that the orange juice and champagne contained some kind of poison, which had killed poor Stuart. Why would David lie about something like putting sarin in the fire towers?

Because it was silly, that’s why. Poison’s one thing; rigging a chemical bomb is another. This building has security up the wa-zoo. Like somebody wouldn’t notice a bomb rigged to a fire escape door? Somebody leaves a brown-bag lunch on a step in the fire tower and hazmat-suited Homeland Security folks would probably be descending on the scene within twenty minutes.

So if the very idea was ridiculous, why was she nervous about opening the door?

Go ahead, Amy.

Go ahead and do it.

She put her hand on the cool steel, as if she could sense by touch.
Oh yeah, clearly there’s a sarin bomb behind this door.

The problem was, Ethan recognized the sensation.

His throat had closed up once before, halfway around the world.

Before coming to work for David’s company, he’d been in the military. Special Forces. Most recently Afghanistan, November
2001, as part of Operation We Think Bin Laden’s Here So We’re Going to Bomb You Back to the Stone Age, and he and his crew had been duking it out with some obscure Afghan warlord in the desert south of Kandahar. A warlord who just so happened to have a few canisters of ricin lying around. A skirmish went wrong; Ethan and his fellow gunmen found themselves tumbling into a medieval-era sandpit, and the warlord—some screw-head named Muhammad Gur—danced around the edge of the pit, throwing in his precious canisters of ricin, cackling.

Ricin, Ethan later read, was manufactured from the waste of castor beans. In weaponized mist form, ricin asks your body to stop making certain important proteins.

Okay, it’s not really
asking.
Ricin pretty much demands it. As a result, cells die. If not treated, the victim follows suit.

All Ethan knew was that his throat was closing up.

He’d been hit the worst out of anybody. He could have sworn that Muhammad Gur jerk had been aiming for him personally. Luckily, Ethan’s colleagues blasted their way out of the pit and dragged Ethan across the desert, looking for help. But when somebody looked down and saw Ethan frantically pointing at his throat, it quickly became clear that he might not make it to the medical supply tent.

A tracheotomy is a quick but complex procedure. In an emergency situation, you find the Adam’s apple, slide down a bit until you feel the next bump—the cricoid cartilage—then find the little valley between the two. Congrats, you’ve found the cricothyroid membrane. That is where you cut: half inch horizontally, half inch deep. Pinch the sides so that the incision opens like a fish mouth, then insert the tube. Don’t have a tube? Use a straw. Or the plastic tube of a ballpoint pen (with the ink stem removed, of course).

Out in the desert south of Kanadhar, Ethan’s savior had a Swiss Army pocketknife and a plastic straw. Saved his life.

But here, inside the fire tower at 1919 Market Street … Ethan was pretty much screwed.

Suffering from a serious Muhammad Gur flashback, Ethan stumbled backwards and imagined, if only for a few seconds, that he was trying to cling to the side of that medieval sand pit. Actually, it was a set of concrete stairs, leading down to the half landing between the thirty-sixth and the thirty-fifth floor.

Ethan tumbled down them. Backwards.

Every step hurt.

But not as bad as the agony in his throat.

This felt worse than ricin.

Castor beans his ass.

This was something else.

Amy stepped back from the door. She thought she heard something on the other side. The pounding of feet? People? Maybe security guards? Cops? A black bag crew? Someone dispatched to clean up their presumed-dead bodies?

Never mind. It could be help.

“Hello?”

She caught herself before pounding on the door. Just on the off
off
chance that the door was indeed rigged; she didn’t want to set off any kind of bomb accidentally.

“Hello! Can you hear me?!”

Ethan recognized Amy’s voice immediately. Her sweet voice. He wished he could answer her.